Hacker Factor

Get involved · Artists

Paint what is being built. Keep everything you sell.

ForPainters, visual and installation artists

0%
of what you sell

is yours

0h
on the wall
0°
camera

the second room watches you work

0 Jan
the first night

The Hacker Factor. One idea from the city, turned into one working app in a day, live on a room full of screens. DJs from the first hour building toward a headliner at night, painters around the perimeter all day, the room running the app on their phones and telling the teams what they think while it is still being built, money moving in public. Community solutions through technology and art.

Art is around the whole room

A full room is going to watch software get built all day, and the reason any of them care is what is happening on the walls. Around the perimeter, from the first hour to the bell, you work in response to the build as it emerges, with the music running beside you and the second room able to turn its head and watch.

Paint what is being built

An artist working on a large mural, seen from below
Photo · cottonbro studio via Pexels

Keep everything you sell

At the close the finished pieces are offered to the room. Your work, your price, your money, on the ledger like everyone else's line. Every piece carries a code offering the room other ways to say yes, led by help us reach the users of the app being built.

Every artist is named on the artist wall, the credits roll and the public record that follows the program into other cities. An anchor artist and a local roster. The wall on the first night is the one that gets replayed.

Who we are looking for

Artists who want their work to be the reason a room cares. The wall on the first night is open. These are the practices we are looking for.

  • Live painters

    The wall

    You have painted in front of people before, at a show or a festival, and you can answer something being built in front of you across eight hours.

  • Muralists

    What stays

    East Austin's walls are the city's gallery. We want a piece that lives after the night, on the wall of the room or at the organization the city chose to run the app.

  • Projection and light artists

    The screens

    A room full of screens carries the build and a vessel fills as the room votes. There is a canvas in that, and a stage behind it.

  • Installation artists

    The floor

    Something people walk through between the floor and the stage, made for the same people the software is made for.

  • The East Side studios

    Canopy · Springdale General · the studio tour

    If your studio is there, or you show on the studio tour, we are already looking for you.

  • Digital and AI artists

    The screens, beside the code

    Work made with the same tools the teams are using, answering the build in real time on the screens. A different way of using AI, shown next to the code it sits beside.

We bring the wall, the light, the camera, the room and the buyers, and you keep everything you sell. Show us your work: name, practice, where to see it, whether you have painted live before.

What it gives back

This is what art does for a community-driven solution: your work is how four hundred people feel what the app is for. The idea came from somebody in this city, the organization the city chose takes it home on Monday, and the reason the room cares enough to fund that is what happened on the walls. Art is how a city works out what matters. This night gives it somewhere to go.

Show us your workName, practice, where to see it